Hello Madden, EA, and NFL faithful - welcome back to another weekly update provided by yours truly, Ian Cummings, lead designer for Madden NFL 10. Can you believe that this is already our 6th official post? If you haven't had a chance to read all of the other posts yet, I'd strongly suggest you do so...they should give some key insight and hopefully show you (slowly but surely) the goals and direction for this year's game.
You can check them out here: 1. Team introduction / Mission Statement
2. Procedural Awareness
3. New Ratings Philosophy
4. Half Sacks / Tackle Assists
5. Improvements to the QB position & layered blending technology
After that quick look at what's been discussed so far, now comes this week's installment: a focus on improvements made to the DB and WR positions.
As most folks already know, as a design team we've been very active on the forums recently (starting about a month or so before the Madden NFL 09 release). Within minutes of talking with the community it's easy to tell that one of the most common areas requested for improvement is DB/WR play. Obviously, we're listening to you, and here are just some of the other improvements and changes that you can expect to see in Madden NFL 10 come August.
Defensive Assignments / Matchups
This screen has some pretty broken stuff all over it, but what the heck, you guys can look at early software objectively right?
For any that aren't totally familiar with this feature, in a nutshell it allows you to assign a defender to ALWAYS shadow a specific receiver around the field. So if someone is moving Randy Moss all over the place and you can't keep track of him, then you can assign your best defender to always keep him covered. I am not really going to dwell on this feature too much as it did exist in the PS2/Xbox days, but I did want to mention that we finally have it back (and it sure feels good to have back). Also of note - this is a Madden only feature.
Route Running and Man CoverageWe've really spent quite a bit of time on the 'game within the game' of WR/DB interaction. There are two improvements that I'd like to expand on first (as I feel they are the most important), and both are animation related.
First, we replaced nearly every single receiver route animation in the game, with the goal of more accurately recreating real life acceleration and momentum. We are also utilizing the route running rating much more now when selecting these animations. We totally re-tuned which cut moves play (and how 'open' the WR gets) based on an elite/agile/non-agile separation in regards to that rating. Check out the video below - it should really show you what kind of difference this makes from 09 to 10:
We did basically the exact same thing for defensive reactions while in man coverage. This has allowed us to really re-work our man coverage AI to use animations as the true determination of how open the receiver gets. Before, there would typically be a time delay placed on the defender's reaction time based on his (and the receiver's) ratings. Now, we can specifically pick different animations to determine how fast he reacts, or whether he gets faked out or not. This creates a much more believable and realistic simuation of momentum. Here are two example cut moves for a defender backpedaling with the receiver in front of him:
Second, we took a page from the FIFA team and added in the concept of 'jostling'. Personally I am extremely stoked to have this in the game because I've written a design for it for 5+ years in a row...unfortunately we just never had the technology to accomplish it. The 'jostling' concept is a set of looping 2-man animations that can play for the WR and DB as they run downfield. The main reason that I am so big on these animations is that it really helps alleviate a balance problem that has existed in Madden for years. I'm talking about the fact that traditionally you can send a player with a 99 speed rating (regardless of his other ratings like route running, catching, etc) on a streak and easily get behind a defender in man coverage. In real life, regardless of the difference in speed, a good defensive back can use his body to keep the receiver in check... a fly route is rarely an untouched foot-race sprint to the endzone. So here's a video example of just one of the many jostling animations you can expect to see in Madden NFL 10:
Adding these animations also allowed us the ability to call more realistic pass interference penalties. We've added a lot of variety that ranges from minor hand-fighting to severe push-offs and holds, so now we can make sure that pass interference gets called in a much more accurate manner. We're using the man coverage rating of the defender to determine how well he keeps the WR in check and how often he gets penalized.
Here are some other changes that have been made so far for route running: * Added support for slip & fall receiver cut moves in bad weather (chances of slipping come from route running ratings)
* Re-factored all double moves to work correctly, including defensive cut moves that are companions to the WR cuts (chances of defender biting come from man coverage rating, play recognition rating, as well as boosts for correctly timed pump fakes)
* Added all new start play WR animations with more realistic acceleration (should be visible in the videos above)
* Added "pop" animations where say a LB will hit a WR as he comes across the middle through his zone
Press / ReleaseAnother area that we thought needed definite improvements was in the battle between receivers and DB's at the line. Below is a list of all the fixes we've made so far:
* Deleted all previous chuck animations, re-added all newly captured ones from scratch
* Extended animation time drastically on chucks. Longer times not only mean smoother looking animations, but also more realistic reactions from WR's (i.e. they can't catch the ball while they are being chucked so you can't fire the ball over to them immediately and expect them to catch it as they aren't looking for the ball)
* Removed all animation compression on chucks to increase visual fidelity.
* Found and fixed an issue where the players wouldn't align properly during the chuck animation which used to cause some weird clipping through each other
* Fixed "suction" bug where press animations could start from like 5 yards away.
* Fixed a bug with zone / man chuck animations...in 09 the chucks for DB's in zone coverage looked just like chucks in man coverage.
* Re-factored the logic for win/loss on chucks based on the route the receiver wants to run. For example, if the WR wants to run inside (i.e. a post), and he "wins" the press, then he won't just pick an animation that beats the press, he'll pick one of many press beating animations that actually break inside. Likewise for defensive players...they'll push the player inside if they "win" the press in like a Cover 2 situation.
* Made it so chucks can now start from stand
Lastly, we've started to use Procedural Awareness (so far just as a purely visual thing). We recently got head tracking in pre-play for WR's so they now look in towards the ball at the snap. This has been long overdue. We also enabled Procedural Awareness head tracking for DB's. In man coverage they will directly 'track' the eyes of the WR, and in zone coverage they will track the QB's eyes, with the ability to also randomly swap targets based on proximity of guys entering their zone.
That's it for this week! We hope these updates and improvements are starting to really show everyone our vision for Madden NFL 10 - one of a true football simulation. For those that would like to know, the NCAA team took all of these improvements (except for the Defensive Matchups - that's Madden only) for NCAA Football 10.
As always, we want your feedback! Definitely let us know any other improvements you'd like to see in this area. We actually have some more improvements still planned to this area but we always want to hear your feedback and any ideas you may have.
Ian Cummings
Lead Designer, Madden NFL 10
